Tomorrow, Wednesday at 7 pm, Casa Árabe de Madrid presents the conference Perspectives of international media coverage of the Israeli war against Gaza 2023-2024: public opinion making and engineering of the Western audience, by Professor Wesam Amer, Dean of the Gaza Faculty of Communication and researcher at Cambridge. Free entry until the capacity of the room is complete. Act in English with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish.
Wesam Amer will critically examine the role of European and US media in shaping public perception of the Gaza War 2023-2025, highlighting biases, the disinformation and framework strategies that have influenced global narratives. Through a comparative analysis of media coverage in the US, UK and Germany, the study applies critical discourse analysis to reveal systematic patterns of information.
His analysis will show how the so-called “western” media have largely aligned with Israeli narratives, often omitting the crucial historical and geopolitical context.
Among the practices observed is the labelling of certain concepts by the media, such as the reference to war as «war between Israel and Hamas» versus «the flood of Al-Aqsa», illustrating how terminology shapes audience perceptions. Another aspect that will be highlighted is the abundance of unverified information, such as widely disseminated but not proven claims, which contribute to distorting the picture of events.
Professor Amer will also show how integrated journalism in the region further restricts perspectives, as international journalists report predominantly from the Israeli side, while Palestinian voices and victims are often questioned or minimized. Your conference will also look at the recurring media frameworks, such as Israel’s «right to self-defence», the description of Hamas using civilians as «human shields» and war as a two-sided conflict, Masking the marked imbalance of power. The exclusion of terms such as «apartheid», «ethnic cleansing» and «genocide» from mainstream discourse in these media also reflects ideological influences on information.
Ultimately, it will analyse how the coverage of western media has not only contributed to disinformation but also eroded journalistic credibility. Professor Amer will highlight the importance of addressing these biases as a crucial exercise in ensuring accurate, balanced and accountable information on conflicts and their humanitarian consequences.
This session is organized in collaboration with the degrees of International Relations and Communication and T&I and Communication of the University of Comillas, representing these programs will participate Bettina Schnell, Foreign Languages coordinator in the Department of Translation and Interpretation and Multilingual Communication of that university, and will be moderated by Olivia Orozco, Education and Economics coordinator at Casa Árabe. It will be broadcast live on our YouTube channel.
